Taking First Steps Into Monetization, Viber Messaging App Announces A Sticker Market

Viber, the app that has promised free messaging and calls to its users since it’s inception, has today announced it’s first step into monetization.

As has been the case with competing apps like WhatsApp, MessageMe, and even Facebook Messenger, Viber plans to use stickers, large clipart-style emoticons and text, to generate revenue.

The company will be creating its own paid content, as well as licensing content from other sources such as television shows, branded characters, etc. Not all of the content within the Sticker Market will be paid, but some of it will be available through in-app purchase.

Viber first introduced stickers back in December of 2012, but has always maintained an entirely free, and ad-free, experience for its users. The Viber Sticker Market will launch “soon” with an update, but the company wouldn’t go into any further detail regarding timing.

Viber would not disclose the split of revenue between the company and the brand or artist licensing the paid stickers, nor would the company share which brands it is working with for launch.

However, Viber did mention that both Viber and the licenser determine the cost of a sticker. Furthermore, we can “definitely” expect more paid features out of Viber in the future, according to founder Talmon Marco.

Remember, shortly after unveiling stickers, Viber launched a doodle feature.

It wouldn’t be a surprise to see the company monetize further functionality within that feature, like unlocking extra colors or drawing tools.

For now, however, we’ll have to wait and see how the Sticker Market plays out for the messaging app, which has over 200 million users.

SparkLabs Presents Its Second Demo Day In Seoul With Eight Startups

SparkLabs, the accelerator that brings Silicon Valley mentorship to Seoul’s young startup ecosystem, presented its second Demo Day presented.

It also added 12 new people to its roster of over 100 mentors, including Dr. Sang Cha, the creator of SAP HANA, one of the enterprise software’s core platforms, Pat Kinsel, Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Polaris Partners and co-founder of Spindle (which was recently acquired by Twitter), and Ty Ahmad-Taylor, Head of Smart TV Services At Samsung Electronics. Each of the up to 15 startups that participates in each SparkLabs class is matched with four to six mentors during the three-month program.

Past SparkLabs participants that have been covered on TechCrunch include KnowRe, an adaptive learning platform for math that announced an $1.4 million investment from SoftBank in January and WePlanet’s Step Journal.

The latest batch of startups “reflect major trends in Asia in terms of what you’ll see in coming years, such as growth in the e-commerce space, new targeted social networks and completely new innovations,” said Eugene Kim, Principal at SparkLabs.

One company presenting today that has already launched a product for a worldwide audience is DesignplusD, the creator of productivity app MemoZy, which has reached the App Store’s top slot for productivity apps in 12 countries. The app announced new features including a registration-based service, a new “Timeline” and synchronization between users’ iPhones and iPads.

Currently live in beta, TrakInvest is a global social investment platform for equities built on a learn-share-earn model. Users receive a phantom cash allocation to start investing and have access to 12,000 research reports updated daily through TrakInvest’s partnership with Reuters. The startup recently signed a deal with Religare, one of the largest brokerage houses in India, to allow its users to execute real money trades through TrakInvest.

Lateral’s search platform COGO is also currently available for sign-ups in beta. COGO automatically retrieves, indexes and organizes your search sessions.

Other startups presenting today include:

iBabyBox, a social marketplace for baby items created by Yong Hyoung, the founder of Korea’s first major social network CyWorld.

HeyBread, an e-commerce company that delivers fresh organic bread from premium bakeries to customers. The startup plans to expand into new categories.

MangoPlate, a restaurant discovery service for Seoul that launched a new UI and service. Their app is currently available on iOS and Android.

StyleWiki, a social wiki for fashion fans that just launched an Android app and will soon have a Web version.

Zoyi, which recently launched Walk Analytics to help stores glean data from offline data like foot-traffic, visit duration and engagement. Walk Analytics is currently targeted at businesses in Seoul because of its high population density and strong mobile penetration.

Social Analytics Startup Socialbakers Hires Its First CMO, Former Adobe VP Neil Morgan

Socialbakers, a social analytics startup headquartered in Prague, is announcing that it has hired its first chief marketing officer — Neil Morgan, who recently left Adobe.

The company says it has 190 employees in 10 offices worldwide. When I spoke to founder and CEO Jan Rezab last week, he described it as as the largest independent player in the market (following the acquisition of competitors like Buddy Media) and as a “hidden gem”. By hiring Morgan (who he described as “a star”), Rezab is probably hoping to remove the “hidden” part of that description.

Morgan was most recently vice president of digital marketing solutions for Europe, Middle East, and Asia at Adobe, a role in which he led marketing efforts for Adobe’s Marketing Cloud products (yes, it’s kind of meta). His marketing experience also includes time at Oracle, Chordiant, Siebel, and Omniture (which was acquired by Omniture).

Socialbakers allows big brands to monitor their activity, and that of their competitors, on social networks. Last week, it launched a new Ad Analytics product. Rezab suggested that the ads that will be successful on social media are the content-driven ones that show up in newsfeeds. So Socialbakers’ Ad Analytics is focused on ads that run in Facebook’s News Feed for now, with plans to add new platforms every eight to 12 weeks.

The product also includes features for testing different ad types and managing campaigns.

“Basically, we’re trying to make ads more intelligent,” Rezab said.

Bang With Friends To Change Names After Trademark Settlement With Zynga

Bang With Friends’ catchy name unfortunately is getting tossed after the startup reached a settlement with Zynga.

The social gaming company had accused the casual sex app of infringing on its “With Friends” line-up. But now both are saying they’ve reached a settlement. Neither company is talking about the terms, however.

It seems like a clear win for Zynga. Bang With Friends had to acknowledge Zynga’s trademark rights and it’s now changing its name. They have a placeholder site called The Next Bang. It seems like there was some worry that Bang With Friends — if it ever got big enough — could color the reputation of Zynga’s more family-friendly games.

Both companies said in a statement:

Zynga Inc. and Bang With Friends, Inc. are pleased that they have reached an amicable resolution of their dispute. Although the terms of the settlement are confidential, Bang With Friends, Inc. acknowledges the trademark rights that Zynga has in its WITH FRIENDS marks and will be changing its corporate name and rebranding its services in the near future. Details on the next version of Bang With Friends can be found at http://www.TheNextBang.com.

The settlement is yet another in a recent string: Zynga recently settled with an executive who defected to mid-core social game-maker Kixeye over theft of trade secrets. Zynga also settled with EA earlier this year over whether an earlier game “The Ville” was a copy of EA’s classic “The Sims.”

To Pus Its Listening Rooms On More Platforms, Soundrop Picks Up $3.4M Led By Spotify Investor Northzone

Norwegian startup Soundrop first made its name as an app on Spotify, tapping into the streaming platform’s catalog to create real-time group listening rooms that were popular places for Spotify users to congregate for more social listening experiences. But as Spotify itself has become a more social platform by default, Soundrop is expanding what it does, and where it does it. Today, it is today announcing a $3.4 million round of funding — led by none other than Spotify’s lead investor, Northzone — that it wants to use to turn up the volume on its growth to more platforms beyond Spotify and into more areas beyond simple listening rooms.

In addition to Northzone, Norwegian-government-back Investinor also participated. Northzone also led the previous $3 million round in the company last year.

The news comes at the same time that another listening room service, Turntable.fm, is also expanding its focus, in its case from listening rooms into shared live music experiences online.

Inge Sandvik, the CEO and co-founder of Soundrop, tells me that while Spotify is currently the only music platform where Soundrop has an app, in the coming weeks this is due to grow. As for where Soundrop apps might appear in future, think about other music streaming platforms such as Deezer that also offer app stores as one likely port of call. Another could be other kinds of streaming services that may operate more around video rather than audio; Soundrop already offers an integration with YouTube on its standalone play.soundrop.fm service for its web app at play.soundrop.fm, its Facebook integrations and its standalone apps for iOS and Android.

While it makes sense that Soundrop will expand to be used in more places as a way of capturing more users, on the other this is quite a change for a company that started out at first working very closely with just one: not only was Spotify its first platform, but the two share an investor, and for a while Soundrop was actually working out of Spotify’s offices.

As Soundrop looks to expand its scope to more platforms, so too, is the focus of the app changing somewhat. “We are quite tired of talking about ‘music discovery,’” Sandvik told me. “That is a crowded space and everyone wants to solve music discovery.”

So, Soundrop is gravitating to where it has seen not just a lot of interest from users, but from labels on the business side, too — specifically in the creation of rooms dedicated to specific artists. Those who have created rooms on Soundrop include Imagine Dragons, Robin Thicke, Zedd, Owl City and some 130 others. The most successful of these are not trivial: Universal Music’s DJs Sebastian Ingrosso & Alesso picked up 28 million OTS users (a traffic metric standing for “opportunities to see”) after heavy marketing from both Universal and Spotify.

“Labels see us as a promotional platform,” Sandvik told me, noting that this is also where the company is generating the most revenues today, too. “We have seen that our artist events have been growing a lot. We are doing artist events almost every day now and several per day and we think we can scale this up quite a lot. This will again drive up their market share where music has been licensed and their revenue will grow.”

That is not to say that larger user-generated listening rooms are disappearing but they will increasingly be complemented by these artist-specific or label-specific rooms. “Music discovery and engaging a crowd is living in symbioses,” he said. “We think we are very well positioned to help out in both areas, but we think we need to focus on what tools we can give artists to amplify themselves when they are aiming to create a engaging relationship with listeners.”

At a time when Spotify is still looking for the magic formula to turn its popularity with consumers into a profitable enterprise, it’s interesting to see Soundrop making a sharp turn to services that, while popular, are also squarely aimed at revenue generation effectively as a music marketing platform. This is one of the reasons that Northzone re-invested. “In the year since Northzone invested in Soundrop, the company has had a focus on product development and tight integration with Spotify,” noted Torleif Ahlsand, General Partner in Northzone and Chairman of Soundrop’s Board of Directors. “Now that the product has reached a new level of maturity, the company is ready to take its next steps. It feels so very right to bring Investinor in to provide additional rocket fuel. With the product well-established, Soundrop is now in pole position to drive revenue and growth in 2014.”

Need To Print Teeny-Weenie Things? The LumiFold Has You Covered

I never thought I’d see the day when someone would find a reason to build a wee tiny foldable 3D printer that can make things about as big as a few matchboxes. This printer, called the LumiFold, is a 3D printer with a build envelope of 90x90x90mm and uses UV sensitive resin to print fairly high-quality objects in a few minutes.

I personally am at a loss to explain why exactly you’d want a portable, small-format 3D printer but I’m sure someone out there can set me straight. The creators are looking for a teeny-weenie $1,500 to fund the project and they’re selling the printer for $429. You can also buy parts kits for a bit less.

The creator, Marin Davide of Italy, explains his reasoning thusly:

It was first designed when a customer asked for a small, portable 3D printer that he wanted ot use for printing dentals molds. He wanted the printer to be cheap and easy to use too. We started developing the LumiFold, and after some months of designing, building prototypes, going back to design again we came up with the current design of the LumiFold. And it proved to be so good, we decided to launch a crowdfounding campaign to provide everyone interested a cheap, portable and easy to use 3d printer!

If television has taught us anything it’s that it takes different strokes to move the world. That said, this compact little resin printer seems to be filling a niche I never knew existed. Portable 3D printers could help designers build prototypes in the field and artists to create projects on the fly. It could also be a way to build replacement parts far from a machine shop. The possibilities, while beguiling, are endless.

Google Analytics For Android Gets Card-Based UI, New Visualizations And Improved Real-Time Reporting

If it’s a Google product and it’s on mobile, it’s getting a card-based user interface. The latest product to get this treatment is Google Analytics for Android. With today’s update, though, the app isn’t just getting a new look. It’s also getting a slew of new features based on feedback Google received from the 700,000 users who have already downloaded it.

In addition to the card-based UI, Google added a few other design-centric features, including its standard slide-out side navigation bar. This update also introduces new visualizations for your stats that automatically resize to fit your screen size and orientation. On a small screen, Google argues, users can quickly become overwhelmed with too much information, so with this update, all the relevant metrics are now spread out over multiple cards so users can get an overview of what’s happening on their sites and then drill down deeper as needed.

As for features, the app now puts a stronger emphasis on real-time data, a feature Analytics first introduced in 2011 but only really started to emphasize over the last few months. The app now also supports Analytics’ Advanced Segments for isolating and analyzing specific types of traffic (say visitors from users who also recently purchased something from your online store) and presents an overview screen for each one of your Analytics reports that allows you to drill down deeper into your most relevant stats to get a closer look at your data.

The app now also allows users to access both web and app reporting views so, as Google notes, “you can keep track of all of your important data with reports that are optimized for whatever device you’re using, ensuring a beautiful and intuitive experience.”

Google developed the app using the Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps, which allows developers to make small changes to their installed apps on the fly without having users download a new version of the app. Because of this, the Google App team says, it will be able to quickly add new reports and visualizations to the app without having to update it.